Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964-1982

The latest series of coups d'état in Latin America has left an enduring impact on the region's contemporary landscape. This book employs a comparative methodology that illuminates distinct national contexts, scrutinizing the fundamental causal factors that precipitated coups in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The essays answer the following questions: when was a given transfer of power defined as a coup d'état? What were the objectives in overthrowing an existing regime? What role did the US government play, as well as local political actors? What were the various options considered by different sectors within each country? What kinds of resistance did the coups face? What were their sources of support? By comprehensively exploring these questions across each national case, this book dismantles the belief that the coups can be grouped into a single category, and marks the culmination of an era in the subcontinent.

About the Author

Sebastián Carassai is a researcher at CONICET and Professor of History at the University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Argentine Silent Majority and Lo que no sabemos de Malvinas. He has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Harvard University and the National Humanities Center.

Kevin Coleman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden and co-editor of Capitalism and the Camera. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.